The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy maintains this blog to disseminate information relevant to astronomers who identify as women. If you have an idea for a blog post or topic, please submit to wia-blog at lists.aas.org.
The views expressed on this site are not necessarily the views of the CSWA, the AAS, its Board of Trustees, or its membership.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

There is an interesting article in the January issue of the Harvard Magazine on women's safety in South Asia that got me thinking about broader implications. The article was written by Rohini Pande, a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is titled "Keeping Women Safe".

We have all seen the shocking headlines about gang rape in India. These cases are getting international publicity and a lot of attention in India. Prime Minister Modi mentioned the subject in his Independence Day speech, saying "Today when we hear about these rapes, our heads hang in shame". Many different efforts are underway to address this crisis. The article reviews them and comes to some noteworthy conclusions.

One obvious way to deal with criminal behavior is to pass new laws. This has been done in India, but the efforts have generally not produced a safer environment for women. The laws increase the penalties for rape convictions, even allowing for the death penalty, but have led to a backlash. Women are increasingly subject to peer pressure to not press charges that result in extended incarceration or death of men in their village or neighborhood. In some cases, local laws are passed to counter or reduce the impact of the wider law to levels even below previous legislation.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Today’s guest blogger is Stella Offner. She is an assistant professor at UMass Amherst.

In the current stressful faculty job market, multiple job offers are becoming more rare and the typical lucky job seeker receives only a single tenure-track offer. The single-job offer naturally produces a more unequal negotiation between the applicant and institution, versus the case of multiple offers where institutions can be pitted against one another, like two wrestling titans. So, how does one successfully negotiate an offer without leverage from a second option?

In two different years I found myself in this situation: the happy recipient of a single tenure-track job offer. Many very helpful resources have been written containing general negotiating advice. Whether you have one offer or many, here is one good resource. However, from my experience I learned that there are some surprising advice omissions. For example, most job-advice panels focus on the best-case scenarios, where the job seekers received what they wanted. Unfortunately, due to the inherent secrecy of offer details, dissatisfied parties rarely broadcast their negotiation failures. Worse, the whole negotiation can go badly wrong. If this happens it is a frustrating and isolating experience. After all, in this job climate wouldn’t one be crazy to decline a tenure-track job offer … in favor of a post-doc?? Although this situation is rare, it happened to me and I have since learned of other instances where applicants walked away from their single tenure-track job offer. All the cases I know of involve women applicants, but this may be due to small number statistics.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Left: President Obama in the middle of saying the word childcare, a word which would be greeted by a standing ovation, and which he would say a total of 7 times during his speech. Right: Government taking an active role in subsidizing childcare in America is currently out-of-fashion, but it isn't a new idea.

I married into a family of State-of-the-Union watchers, and I have embraced the tradition of watching the address live. Yesterday, we managed to get the kids (mostly) in bed and (mostly) asleep by the 9pm start, and so my wife and I snuggled up to hear what the President had to say.

Over the past decade, these addresses have been peppered with words like "terrorist", "war", "recession", and "unemployment". Then, just about 14 minutes in, I heard a different word: "childcare".

"Wait, what?" said Margaret. "Is this really happening?"

Then, yes, it happened. President Obama told us that childcare is a national economic priority:

Monday, January 19, 2015

Dr. Lisa M. Frehill [1] is an IPA at NSF in Strategic Human Capital Planning working as an Organizational Evaluation and Assessment Researcher. Her home institution is Energetics Technology Center in St. Charles, MD, where she has completed science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce analysis and assessment and evaluation in support of the Office of Naval Research, the DoD STEM Development Office and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A past NSF awardee, Dr. Frehill was the PI and Program Director of the ADVANCE: Institutional Transformation program when she was an associate professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. She is an expert on diversity in STEM and on program evaluation. A forthcoming volume (co-edited with Willie Pearson, Jr. and Connie L. McNeely) titled Advancing Women in Science: An International Perspective is due winter 2015 from Springer. In her free time, Lisa enjoys hiking, yoga, visiting family and baking.

This is the first in a series of posts about diversity in astronomy. The idea for the series emerged from conversations with Dr. Joan Schmelz, who is serving as an NSF program officer in the Division of Astronomy on loan from the University of Memphis. Joan has been involved in issues for women in astronomy and is interested in being attentive to how to more generally increase the diversity of her field.

This first post will provide a view of the pipeline into college and bachelor’s degree attainment in both astronomy and physics, which is an important “feeder field.” Future posts will look at U.S. astronomy degrees in greater detail. This post relies on institutionally-reported data in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) were accessed via the National Science Foundation WebCASPAR database tool.

What does the STEM pipeline into college look like from a diversity standpoint? The answer to this is a “glass half full/half empty.” On the one hand, we have seen a significant narrowing of the sex gap in high school preparation in mathematics and sciences. Indeed, high school boys recently caught up with high school girls to earn an average of 7.4 credits in mathematics and science (Nord et al., 2011). Girls (14 percent) and boys (12 percent) are equally likely to have taken a “rigorous” high school curriculum consisting of at least four years of English and mathematics (including pre-calculus or higher), and three years each of social studies, science (including biology, chemistry and physics), and foreign language. These are important increases since 1990, when just 4 percent of girls and 5 percent of boys had taken a rigorous high school curriculum. Science, not mathematics, continues to be a more important issue for girls. An additional 15 percent of girls would have completed a rigorous curriculum by taking just one more science class, as compared to an additional 9 percent of boys.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

"Women of Color in Astronomy and Astrophysics" was a joint effort of the AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) and the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA). It was written by Dara Norman, Jedidah Isler & Hakeem Oluseyi (CSMA) and Nancy Morrison, Caroline Simpson & Laura Trouille (CSWA). It is especially powerful because it describes strategies for overcoming the barriers that have kept the percentages of Women of Color in the sciences so low.

Women of color (WoC) are at the intersection of race and gender. While they experience issues that arise for both women and minority groups, they are often overlooked in efforts on behalf of either category, to the detriment of their persistence in academia [1]. The next section of this article enumerates barriers that face WoC in astronomy, starting with those that particularly affect career establishment (early graduate student to postdoctoral) and moving to those that impact later career stages. Later sections describe steps toward solutions to these problems, measures taken by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and lessons learned from academic programs.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The below is an anonymous guest post submitted by an astronomer on the faculty job market for the first time.

I am a woman in her early 30’s in astronomy, and this is my first time applying for faculty jobs. Here’s what I knew beforehand. I knew statistically that I’d be likeliest to “leak” from the research pipeline at this exact juncture: reaching up to barely touch the lowest rung of junior professor. I knew that women falsely identify limitations as lying within when they truly lie without: that Impostor Syndrome is especially rampant among us. And I knew the process would be fraught with rejection. Despite educating myself, I have been grappling with profound feelings of inadequacy that are very gendered. There are statistics of women leaving science at this stage, but a lived experience isn’t fully expressed with statistics: what does it feel like to be a woman grappling with this professional transition with all her might? My mental health provider had to remind me that there is a context for this struggle beyond my own scientific record and the scary academic job market. If I’m feeling this stuff, so are other women. It’s so hard to hang in there. She said, “if you could talk about this to other women at your same stage, what would you say? What would you like to hear?” I’d want to hear how it feels to other women, to normalize my own experience. My experience as a white, middle-class, cisgendered woman is a privileged one, and is not universal: distinct emotional costs exist for people residing at other intersections. My experiences are reflective of my social status, and ought to be read that way.

Monday, January 5, 2015

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) is conducting a survey on Workplace Climate. The CSWA wants to learn if members of the astronomical community encounter negative language, or experience verbal or physical altercations on the basis of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability status, or race and ethnicity. The survey is designed to request information during the respondent's current position and previous position (if the respondent has changed positions within the last five years). This information is requested in order to understand if astronomers and planetary scientists encounter varying workplace climates at different stages of their career.

Please help us in our pursuit to better understand how workplace climate impacts the members of the astronomical community. Go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CSWA_Workplace_Climate_Survey to complete a confidential survey. We appreciate your input and welcome participation from all members of the astronomical and planetary scientist community over the age of 18.

For attendees of the 225th Meeting of the AAS in Seattle, Poster Session 242.04. An Update on the NASA Planetary Science Division Research and Analysis Program (Christina Richey; Exhibit Hall 4AB) includes an update on the CSWA harassment survey. Christina will be at the poster on Tuesday during regular poster hours.

Friday, January 2, 2015

This guest post is composed by the organizers of the Inclusive Astronomy meeting.

We are pleased to announce and invite the participation of all to the inaugural meeting on Inclusive Astronomy to be held June 17-19, 2015, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Inclusive Astronomy 2015 will serve as a welcoming, strategic venue to advocate and provide resources for the inclusion in the astronomy community of: people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, or questioning (LGBTIQ) people; people with disabilities; women; and anyone who holds more than one of these identities. Those who seek to aid in such inclusion are also invited to attend. The organizing committee includes members of the Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy, Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, and Working Group on LGBTIQ Equality of the American Astronomical Society.

Previous successful conferences on diversity and inclusion in astronomy have primarily focused on the need for better representation of women. A key focus of Inclusive Astronomy 2015 will be on intersectionality: the well-established conceptualization that racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, and ableism are linked (e.g., that women of color are faced with the intersection of racism and sexism) and that taking a one-dimensional approach to diversity does not adequately describe people with more than one of these identities. More generally, this meeting will focus strongly on diversity, equity, and inclusion of people of color, LGBTIQ people, women, and people with disabilities in the field of astronomy.